Being an INFJ...for Christ

The following is a paper I wrote on my MBTI type for my Self-Awareness in Leadership class.

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I have certainly had a long and complicated relationship with the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Instrument). For years I tested as (and considered myself to be) an INTJ. Earlier this year, after some careful thought I realized I didn't seem as externally structured and demanding as the INTJ, and that I actually seemed to fit the mold of an INTP better. A few months after that, I further realized that I was in fact an INFJ (albeit a distorted one) and likely had been all along. After all these transitions, I joked that I had made it my new goal to become all 16 types at one point or another; anything seemed possible! To explain my shifts, I had to look into some of the history of the MBTI.

In his 1921 work Psychological Types, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung postulated several theories of personality that persist into the modern MBTI. He saw a high-level divide among people between what he called introverted and extroverted types. [1] He describes the extroverted type as outward-oriented, with a consciousness focused on the objective, external world: "If a man so thinks, feels, and acts, in a word so lives, as to correspond directly with objective conditions and their claims, whether in a good sense or ill, he is extraverted." Introverts, on the other hand, filter their consciousness through subjective, internal factors; their life is lived not primarily in the external world of objects but in the inner world of thoughts, feelings, and ideas: "Introverted consciousness doubtless views the external conditions, but it selects the subjective determinants as the decisive ones."

Additionally, Jung described four "cognitive functions" that together form the basis of consciousness. These are divided into two perceiving functions, sensing and intuition; and two judging functions, thinking and feeling, which should be familiar to anyone who has been briefed on the MBTI. Jung said that each of these functions could be used in an extroverted (external, object-oriented) or introverted (internal, subject-oriented) way. One of these, the "principal", is the function where "not merely its application is at the disposal of the will, but...at the same time its principle is decisive for the orientation of consciousness." It is the function that forms the foundational bedrock of the consciousness. Besides the principal function, there is another less conscious "auxiliary" function of the opposite judging/perceiving type as the principal.

In the 1940s, Isabel Myers and her mother, Katharine Briggs, crafted a self-reporting instrument to help people discover where they fit in Jung's theory of types.[2] This instrument became the MBTI. Focusing on Jung's pattern of dichotomies between functions, Myers and Briggs used three letter combinations—E/I, S/N, and T/F—to convey a person's general introversion or extroversion, as well as his principal and auxiliary functions. They also added a fourth letter pair, J/P, that indicates whether a person's first extroverted function (not necessarily the principal for introverts) is the judging or the perceiving function.

However, many MBTI tests, books, and websites (including Live Your Calling) don't explain it in this way. Instead of viewing types through the lens of Jung's original system of cognitive functions, with the S/N and T/F pairs giving an individual's main two functions and the other pairs describing how they are manifested, the more common way is to associate certain characteristics with the letter pairs themselves. These distinctions are somewhat accurate for the two middle letter pairs representing functions (though they lose the introverted/extroverted distinction), but rather inaccurate for the first and last pairs. Instead of being associated with how the cognitive functions are used, introversion and extroversion came to describe how people-focused and gregarious you are (or where you get your energy from), and judging and perceiving describe how organized and task-oriented you are. The characteristics associated with a type's four letters are then combined to get the description for that type.

The problem with this approach is that it effectively turns the type descriptions into horoscopes. By defining types by their symptoms and manifestations instead of by their causes (the cognitive functions), a person might find that many different type descriptions sound like them and experience the kind of type confusion that I did. This problem is especially acute for introverted types, since their principal function will be of the opposite J/P type as their type states. (e.g. for an INFJ the first extroverted function is feeling, but the principal function is introverted intuition, a perceiving function) It also conveys the impression that you can only be one of each distinction, e.g. only a thinker or a feeler, whereas in reality everyone does both, albeit to different degrees.

Once I learned to think about types in this way, my own type confusion slowly lifted. As I read some descriptions of the cognitive functions[3], I realized that introverted intuition seemed to describe me almost exactly in how I thought and processed reality. It had to be my principal function, which already narrowed things down to just two possible types: INFJ and INTJ. (This helps explain why I used to test as INTJ) However, I also realized introverted thinking described me almost as well, as it had formed a tight partnership with my intuition; one generated seemingly impossible ideas and possibilities, the other logically evaluated them and put them into convincing words, a combination that often came in handy on my blog. This helps explain how I identified as an INTP, since introverted thinking is the principal function of the INTP.

But I knew for a fact that I had both of these functions in their introverted form, whereas the INTJ and INTP each only had one (and extroverted the other). But the INFJ had both. And it had something else as its main judging function: extroverted feeling. Since I had always emphatically thought of myself, partially reinforced by the MBTI, as a "thinker" and not a "feeler", this took a while to believe, but eventually it started to make sense. I wasn't interested in ideas merely for the sake of ideas like an INTP, but for the sake of people. And though inwardly I was rigorously logical, outwardly I was more concerned with serving people and making them happy, not with efficiency and logical correctness like an INTJ. (And I was bad at chess, which is virtually the symbol of the INTJ)

As an INFJ, my primary function is my introverted intuition. The result of directing my intuition toward the inner world of thoughts and ideas is that I readily grasp new ideas and am very quick to see possibilities where others don't. I have an intuitive, nonverbal sense of right and wrong, as well as which ideas are correct. I "know" things without being readily able to explain why I know them, and tend to jump to conclusions and then find ways to test and support them. I believe that if there are exceptions to a rule, the rule is too narrow. I see paradoxes and apparently contradictions not as a sign of fallacious thinking but as a challenge, a contribution for a higher, overarching "theory of everything". I am always looking at problems and ideas from multiple angles, trying to understand every side in a conversation at once.

I am used to combining this intuition with thinking, which has helped me become the amateur theologian that I am, trying to make sense of Christianity, the Bible, and conversations on faith. But according to my description thinking is only the tertiary function, whereas feeling is the auxiliary function. And so I have been learning to applying my insights more directly to people. This has multiple implications for working in teams. INFJs value harmony, and I am certainly no exception; I would love it if everyone could just get along, or at least disagree nicely and constructively with no raging tempers or hurt feelings. To this end, my intuition helps me in seeing both sides of a conflict, while my feeling function helps me to act as a mediator. At times I can be more interested in simply making sure a team is getting along, maximizing the potential of others, than in contributing to the end goal.

On a more individual level, the INFJ's combination of intuition and feeling makes them very good at picking up on nonverbal cues and emotions. If someone is feeling "off", I can usually tell. (The challenge is actually doing something about it) When teaching Sunday school, I tend to gravitate towards the kids who are alone or off by themselves; as a child I often felt like an outcast and so I am drawn toward other outcasts. This can again be useful for building unity on a team. Also, INFJs tend to be perfectionists[4] who hold themselves to very high standards. The wishes and expectations of others hold a very high value for me, to the point where I sometimes idolize them. For this reason I am very keen to carry out what is expected of me by others, not out of an innate sense of duty like the ISTJ but because I care about people and am anxious to please them.

On the other hand, the INFJ's reliance on intuition above all else can also get them into trouble. When someone disagrees with me or my values, my first response is to assume that the conflict arises from a limitation of perspective and look for a way to reconcile our apparently clashing views by explaining how they can both be true. If I am unable to do this, though, or if the other person doesn't accept my explanation, I will stubbornly cling to my intuition even in the presence of opposing arguments. I believe strongly that I am right, and the only reason this confidence in my ideas doesn't get me into more trouble is because I usually keep it to myself and try to avoid saying things to others that I can't support.

My introversion can also be a weakness in a team or relationship. Though I value deep, close relationships, I am also very private and value time spent alone. This means that I am best on a team when I can still work relatively independently and present only my finished work to teammates. If I am forced to work more closely with other people, conflict can arise (I always dreaded group projects in school). It also makes me slow to warm up to and trust people; I probably come off as distant or tuned-out to most people except those who know me well. Because I am so slow to form new relationships, I treasure the ones I have.

Some "natural" spiritual gifts for an INFJ might be service, mercy, or discernment, but more than these I tend to use knowledge and giving. For me knowledge is not simply the timely and helpful remembrance of facts, but more a natural talent for navigating the world of truths and ideas behind these facts. My inclination to help and please people motivates me to turn this gift to the service of others instead of just endlessly indulging my curiosity. Likewise, it is mostly my desire to help people however I can that lies behind my gift of giving; I recognize the resources God has given me, see ways to contribute them for the good of others, and then do so. I tend to be very devoted to those I care about, which makes it easy to give parts of myself to ministry partnerships.

More typology, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the F

So, about my conclusion a few months ago that I'm an INTP... I have come to realize that I was mistake about that. I now consider myself an INFJ.

I can assure you, this is as much a surprise to me as it probably is to you, loyal reader.

How can this be, you may ask? How can the author of such an unashamedly cerebral blog be a "Feeler"? Didn't you decide you much more strongly resembled an INTP? Are you just being wishy-washy and picking whatever type you feel like at the moment?

My mistake last time was deciding based on outward manifestations of the types. My whole method involved taking the descriptors in the MBTI images like the one shown above and averaging how much each one seemed to resemble me. But these things--and the four letter dichotomies themselves--are descriptors, not definitions. Stereotypes like J's being organized, F's being soft and shallow thinkers, or I's needing lots of alone time merely describe common epiphenomena (outward effects) of how personality really works. The descriptions of the 16 types that are just based on the four dichotomies read like horoscopes--they're sufficiently general that it's easy to "see yourself" in lots of them, and there is great potential for bias toward whatever you tested as.

For a better picture, we need to look at the history of the MBTI. Carl Jung, a disciple of Freud, originally postulated four "cognitive functions" that make up personality:

• The perceiving functions, sensing and intuition
• The judging functions, thinking and feeling

Jung believed that every person manifested each of these functions in an introverted or extroverted form. In other words, no one is "just" a thinker or a feeler, or a senser or an intuitive. Everyone uses all four of these functions, but they may be directed inwardly or outwardly. The contribution of Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers was to distill Jung's theory of cognitive functions into three letter combinations--E/I, S/N, and T/F--and to add a fourth, J/P, that describes a person's preferred extroverted function, perceiving or judging.

I'm going to explain my journey to INFJ in two ways: the thinking way and the intuitive way.

The Thinking Way

Anyway, thinking about types in terms of these cognitive functions rather than the simple dichotomies of the individual letters and their attendant stereotypes is generally accepted (at least around all the internet forums full of profiling and psychology nerds) to be a more reliable way of determining your type. Someone recommended a test to me that I really liked that scores you based on your preferences the eight cognitive functions (four introverted, four extroverted). I took it and got the following scores (averaged over two iterations on successive days):

Introverted Intuition (Ni)	44.75
Introverted Thinking (Ti)	42.8
Extroverted Intuition (Ne)	34.65
Introverted Feeling (Fi)	30.35
Extroverted Feeling (Fe)	28.6
Extroverted Thinking (Te)	24.55
Introverted Sensing (Si)	22.4
Extroverted Sensing (Se)	12.5

These results, especially the high introverted thinking and intuition, confirmed what I'd been suspecting. (Of course there is a risk of cognitive bias here) Bear with me; I realize I'm sounding more like an INTJ here. The standard MBTI model assigns four of these eight functions to each type: one of each function, two introverted and two extroverted. The dominant and auxiliary (first and second) functions correspond to the middle letters in your MBTI type; for introverts, the dominant function is introverted and the auxiliary is extroverted. For J's, the judging function (thinking or feeling) is the extroverted secondary; for P's the perceiving function (sensing or intuition) is extroverted. These functions and their order, from most to least preferred, comprise your "function stack". So the introvert's dominant function, the one they are most accustomed to, is the one opposite their J/P distinction, which is one reason why focusing on the four-letter codes is confusing.

With this in mind, it's a bit inconvenient that my top four functions only cover three of the letters and include only one extroverted function. Whatever type I end up as is only going to be an approximation. But which is the smallest approximation? As I asked for advice, the three closest (and their function stack) were:

• INTP (Ti Ne Si Fe)
• INTJ (Ni Te Fi Se)
• INFJ (Ni Fe Ti Se)

Looking at the interaction of the functions provided more clarity than the simple dichotomies of the letters, like a "back door" to my type. For example, I always thought of myself as "a thinker", but this model affirmed that I was both and asked which one I was more of outwardly. INFJ was surprising, but interesting in that it had both Ti and Ni, which, if you have read much of this blog, you will recognize as strengths of mine. I recognized Ni in particular as being "me" from all the descriptions: a continual open-minded shifting of perspectives to see past apparent contradictions and redefine problems in interesting ways. For this reason, INTP, lacking Ni, seemed like an increasingly poor descriptor for me. Someone suggested ISTP because it had both Ti and Ni, but its function stack is Ti Se Ni Fe, and my intuition is definitely more prominent than that. (Notice how above both sensing functions were dead last on the test I took...case in point, today I almost got hit by a train because I was lost in thought while walking down the street)

That left the two INxJ types that had Ni as their dominant trait, which I thought seemed very likely for me. But, even though I have always thought of myself as a "thinker", INTJ seemed like a poor fit. The functional description of extroverted thinking describes a focus on logical, straight-line arguments and appeals to evidence and empirical verifiability to make efficient plans and get others to see things your way. That barely sounds like me on my blog (recall my posts addressing the limits of empirical knowledge), much less in the rest of life, where I rarely even share my line of reasoning about something unless asked. Plus the INTJ lacks introverted thinking, which sounds much more like me.

That left INFJ (interesting article on the differences and similarities with INTP). The only difficulty in seeing myself as one was the fact that I don't consider myself a very warm or emotional person--but is this because I'm intrinsically not, or only because I've always been typecast (by myself and others) as a rational? After consulting some INFJs, they generally agreed that I sounded like one of them, but with an especially developed Ti function so that I seemed more like an INTP. So, effectively, the middle two parts of my function stack are reversed, resulting in Ni Ti Fe Se. Having my dominant and auxiliary traits be introverted also explains why I seem to live in my head even more than most introverts.

The Intuitive Way

The more I've thought about it, the more INFJ (albeit an especially cerebral one) seems to "fit" me--not in a superficial way like the type horoscopes, but on a deeper level that makes a lot of sense of my life and also challenges me. I'm not interested in directly implementing my ideas like an INTJ, and I'm not merely interested in ideas for the sake of ideas like an INTP (or I would probably have a BS in mathematics now); I'm interested in ideas for the sake of people who are affected by them indirectly or directly by believing them.

The extroverted feeling function is concerned with politeness, social conventions, and public ethics. For me, this often manifests as being "diplomatic" about my ideas; I try to explain them in a sensitive and warm way that people will respond positively to, even if it means withholding their full extent--because, I figure, they are more likely to be believed that way. It means trying to see every idea in the best possible way, even ones I disagree with like Calvinism, because much conflict can be avoided if we respect people regardless of what they think and don't settle for caricatures of peoples' beliefs but respect them. It means I don't mind when people disagree with me, but I can barely sleep at night if I have an outstanding interpersonal conflict with someone. Extroverted feeling guides how I go about sharing and implementing my thoughts and ideas. This blog tends to be a nice "safe place" to do so.

Meanwhile, having introverted intuition and thinking as my top two functions is kind of fun. Especially since my whole episode of doubt and the new perspective on faith and the Bible it opened up, I've been able to successfully combine them into something resembling a superpower. My intuition leads me on convoluted paths of abstract reasoning around and above simple dichotomies, restricting definitions, boxes that constrain thinking, naive analogies, and apparent paradoxes that others see as unresolvable; then my thinking pulls these nonverbal hunches up into my conscious mind where they can be examined from every angle, evaluated for soundness, and converted into a coherent and persuasive argument that I effectively received "for free", without having to reason it out with thinking alone. Oops! I just shared the secret to writing this blog. Don't copy me.

But again, my ultimate goal in all of this is not simply to understand as many ideas as possible; it is to do something meaningful, to make a difference somehow. That is why I get annoyed with theological debates like supra/infra/sublapsarianism, seeing them as pointlessly speculative. So, ultimately, I end up viewing my thinking and intuition not as ends unto themselves but as tools in the service of higher goals that are set by by extroverted feeling. These higher goals involve people, not just ideas. So my desire to help other people who experience religious doubt or skepticism as I have, so my willingness to withhold my thoughts and hunches when I don't think they'll be helpful to people. Again, four letters can never define or sum up who I am. But they are a nice description to wear for now, and a bigger set of shoes to grow into in time to come.

Typology! (not the theological kind)

Thanks largely to my friend Mike, I am a big nerd for personality testing and profiling as a way to better know myself and others. I am also taking a class at my church called SHAPE (which stands for--let me try this without looking it up--Spiritual Gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, Experiences, and Values which didn't fit in the acronym) which is focused on helping people learn about their unique role in the church and uses several tests to help people learn more about themselves. Two of these tests are Strengths Finder, which is well-known in the business world, and the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), which can be taken for free here. The practice of profiling people with the MBTI is sometimes called "typology", which unfortunately shares a name with a hermeneutical philosophy I won't get into here.

In a nutshell, the MBTI classifies people on four spectra (click the link or take the test for more details):

• Extroversion - Introversion: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world?
• Sensing - Intuitive: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning?
• Thinking - Feeling: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances?
• Judging - Perceiving: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options?

The 16 possible combinations of these letter pairs form the 16 MBTI types. As may not surprise you if you clicked that first link and know me or my blog, I have tested as an INTJ each of the 5+ times I have tried. In SHAPE, though, I took the test again but as we were going through attributes of the types, I realized a lot of the P characteristics sounded a lot like me. So, I did what anyone would do and typed the traits of both types into a spreadsheet, sorted the list, pulled out the ones that appeared in both, and rated myself for all the unique ones on a seven-point scale, thus determining in a quintessentially T way that I am an INTP.

I also made this Venn diagram for anyone else who shares my confusion.

And then I did one better and did some crazy Python scripting to generate this spreadsheet showing the traits of each MBTI type by which neighbor(s) they are shared with. If you are similarly type-confused,  Note: to facilitate the finding of intersections between MBTI types, I split some compound traits into their parts, e.g. "objectively critical" to "objective" and "critical".

Looking back, I realized a big part of the reason for the shift is this blog, especially the writing I've done in recent months on working through doubt. Through it, I've realized that simply knowing true things--and, by extension, believing oneself superior to those who don't--isn't as crucial to Christian faith as I'd previously thought. It's tragic when Christians get more into knowing things about God and His word, than simply knowing God Himself and seeing how this knowing changes everything about us and the world we perceive. The words of Scripture are finite, but the new reality they describe and hint at is bottomless. The fact that I'll be exploring this reality for (I believe) eternity might be disheartening to a J, but I find it as joyful as it is humbling.

The Authenticity of Faith

Over the weekend I finished reading a very interesting and helpful book--The Authenticity of Faith, written by Richard Beck, a professing Christian and experimental psychologist. (Read his excellent blog here)

Freud and the Illusion of Religious Experience

The Authenticity of Faith is devoted to examining renowned psychologist and atheist Sigmund Freud's view of religion as a form of wish-fulfillment. In his book The Future of an Illusion, Freud asserts that religious belief is not achieved by an honest desire to know the truth, but as a way to seek relief from subconscious conflicts and primal wishes, like the generalized need for a father figure. Later philosophers like Ernest Becker adopted this view and modified it to be less about psychological neuroses (Freud's tendency to see these everywhere being well-known) and more about, more plausibly, existential angst. In this view, we are confronted with the terror of death, the apparent meaninglessness of suffering, and the loneliness that so often characterize the human condition. Unable to face these things, people turn to the panacea of religion to assure themselves that they are not really alone in the universe, that their life does have meaning, and that death is not the end, among others.

Whatever the assigned basis for religious belief, these arguments are different from classic skeptical counterapologetics in that they don't seek to disprove the object of religious faith (the truth of God's existence) and instead seek to explain the faith itself. Faith is no longer seen as being based on objective realities, but on deep-seated wish fulfillment and self-deception that believers are not even aware of--an illusion that we want to believe because it is immensely comforting, so we do. This effectively undermines the rational, philosophical tradition of classical apologetics by questioning whether apologists' arguments, warrants, and justifications for religious belief come from an honest desire to know truth or (as Freud believed was  the case) other psychological needs.

This attempt to undermine faith by "explaining it away" has been repeated and rehashed by atheists and skeptics countless times since Freud first stated, and it continues to show up frequently in the anti-faith writings of the "new atheists". It has been so effective in part because Christian apologetics has been so slow and ineffectual at answering it. Freud's question shifts the subject of the apologetical debate out of the realms of philosophy, logic, and theology in which it has been comfortably residing and into psychology, where "classical" apologists are largely unable to follow.¹ Until now. Beck makes the observation that Freud's theory is not philosophical in nature but psychological--an empirical claim about how people think. So why debate it when you can simply test it?

Of course, people already have. An experiment in "terror management theory" sought to test the connection between the kind of existential dread thought to be the basis for faith and adherence to a religious worldview. Christian subjects were asked to either answer questions about the nature of their own deaths or more mundane subjects (the control group) and then asked to evaluate the personality profiles and responses to social-attitude questions of two fictional students. The essays were similar except that the author was identified as either a Christian or a Jew. The group that was primed with "death-salience" questions was statistically significantly more positive and accepting of the Christian author and more denigrating of the Jewish author. In other words, being confronted with the kinds of difficult, existential aches that faith is supposed to soothe was correlated with clinging to that faith more tightly and defending it from the existential "Other" whose beliefs serve as an implicit threat to its truthfulness. This proves Freud's theory--or does it?

William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience

With the empirical evidence for Freud's theory of religion in place, Beck turns to another author: William James, the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. This is a landmark survey of the religious experiences of many "ordinary" believers. James sees two categories of believers: "healthy-minded souls" and "sick souls". The names are somewhat misleading; "healthy-minded souls" deploy their religious beliefs to minimize existential angst and evil as Freud predicted. They "actively ignore or repress experiences that are morbid, dark, or disturbing". In Christianity, this looks like applying faith as a Band-Aid to minimize or deny the difficulties of life, giving trite consolations that "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life", "it will all work out in the end", "death is not the end", and so on. While acknowledging that this attitude is engaged in "denial, obfuscation, and avoidance", James also believes that wanting to avoid evil and death is part of human nature and everyone engages in this denial to some degree.

But the "sick soul" variety of religious experience flies in the face of Freud's theory. These believers do not attempt to use their faith to minimize existential pain but face this pain head-on (as Freud called skeptics to do) but are highly existentially aware, keeping the death, pain, and evil of existence firmly in view. Their relationship with God is marked by doubts and complaints of the kind seen in Psalm 13, 35, 86, or 88: "Where are you, God? Why can't I feel you?" And yet this doubt-and-complaint-filled faith is not necessarily weak or dying faith, as demonstrated by none other than Mother Teresa, who privately expressed deep doubts in God's very existence even during her forty-year ministry in Calcutta.

Beck attacks an assumption of both Freud and many Christians that faith and complaint to God are at two ends of a sliding scale--that faith is equivalent to cheerily, unprotestingly following God wherever you go and asking God, "Where are You?" is tantamount to a loss of faith. Here is my awesome mockup of his chart of this view.

Instead, he argues from studies done with the Spiritual Assessment Inventory and Attachment to God inventory, faith is at least two-dimensional; he labels the dimensions "communion" and "complaint". James' "sick souuls" occupy the high-communion, high-complaint region while "healthy-minded" souls are high-communion, low-complaint and religious skeptics and disengaged believers occupy the low-communion quadrants.

Empirical Evidence

To further test his hypothesis, Beck created the Defensive Theology Scale (DTS), an assessment for Christians to determine where they fall on the healthy-sick soul spectrum. It asks assessees to state their level of agreement with questions like, "Nothing is too small, even finding my keys, to pray to God about", "God has a destiny for me to find and fulfill", and "God protects me from illness and misfortune". With this ability to distinguish between "summer" and "winter" Christians, Beck turns to some empirical studies.

First, he redoes the worldview defense study used earlier to "prove" Freud's theory with a few changes. Beforehand, he had all 207 Christian participants take the DTS. Some were then primed with questions about their own deaths while the control group got questions about TV programming. They were then asked to read two essays written by fake students, one Christian and one Buddhist (to get around possible anti-semitic convolution). He found using a two-way analysis of variance that there was a much stronger correlation between peoples' scores on the DTS and their defense of the Christian/denigration of the Buddhist than their exposure to mortality salience questions. In other words, Christians that would have fallen into James' category of "sick souls" displayed less worldview defense and were more fair toward the Buddhist offer, while "healthy-minded" Christians were more likely to engage in worldview defense--both relatively independently of whether they were primed with the mortality questions beforehand.

He describes the results of three more studies. In the first, he observes a strong correlation between low DTS score and comfortability with the thought of Jesus having uniquely human bodily functions we don't normally associate with Him, like diarrhea, tooth decay, and bad breath. In the second, he finds a correlation between high DTS score and preference of an explicitly Christian painting (Never Alone, by Ron DiCianni) over a more neutral one by a well-known and critically acclaimed artist (Stone City, Iowa, by Grant Wood, the painter of American Gothic).

Finally, in the last study, he found high scorers on the DTS were much more likely to attribute evil and pain in the world to Satan instead of to God. (Side note: there are abundant Biblical examples of both, so the low DTS scorers were not simply contradicting their faith by answering as they did)

Beck's final ruling sides with William James over Sigmund Freud. While admitting that Freud's theory of faith as subconscious, fear-motivated denial of death and meaningless can be true, Beck says that it it doesn't describe everyone's religious experience. In particular, the existence of believers who do not use faith for existential consolation is incompatible with Freud. More subjectively, he also makes the case that we have much to learn from these "sick souls" in our modern, pluralistic world. Faith as a comprehensive system for escaping the fear of death and meaninglessness is threatened by the implicit relativization of living alongside people who hold different beliefs. Clinging to one's own faith and denying relativism has well-known costs: worldview defense, the denigration of the Other, and, ultimately, holy wars. Keeping faith in the midst of doubts and challenges is a subject beyond the scope of this post, but James' "sick souls" already know a thing or two about what it takes.

Evaluation

Overall, I highly recommend Beck's book, which is quite worth its somewhat steep price tag. It is a wholly satisfying answer to the skeptics who constantly trumpet Freud's theory as the death knell of authentic faith, addressing Freud's claim as a psychological theory with further psychological research. For this reason I think both religious believers and skeptics can learn much from it. I would only add a few qualifications. Beck's constant tendency to summarize and review his previous points makes him very easy to follow, but also makes the book a bit longer of a read than I think it needs to be.

Also, I think from reading him one can get the impression that all Christians either do nothing but deny existential angst and use religion as a Band-Aid or complain to God and never really feel Him. I think Beck would say that both extremes can and should be part of the Christian experience (just look at the Psalms, which span nearly the whole range of human emotion). The point of Christianity is of course not to never be able to feel God or have joy in Him, but times will come when God's presence seems distant and our joy is snuffed out, and we need to be prepared to accept these times as part of the Christian experience rather than answer them with platitudes.

Truly authentic faith spans the whole spectrum of human experience; the valleys of life, not just the peaks and plateaus. God is not absent from us in our troubles or off in the heavens beckoning us to come back, He is there with us in the midst of our troubles. As David writes in Psalm 139:7-8:

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

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¹ Actually, contrary to what Beck says I think it is possible to answer Freud purely from a classical apologetical standpoint. Freud's argument says nothing about the actual truth of religion, it only offers an explanation for religious faith assuming it is false. If God (the Christian God, at least) does exist, it is entirely unsurprising that He would create people with a deep desire and need to know Him. Freud points to the too-perfect alignment of peoples' subconscious wishes and the tenets of religious faith that tidily answer them as evidence of design--but whose design: the human inventors of religion or the Divine creator of humans? Either way, the fact that religion speaks to our deepest needs is to be expected, so Freud's argument is really unconvincing to me. However, Beck's answering a psychological theory of religion on its own terms is much more satisfying than this answer and makes the book well worth reading.